The pasta menu gives customers the to-order choice of various noodles, sauces and proteins, which are then sautéed together in the woks.

Food to Go

Mezza operates a satellite called Pronto on the Starbucks building's eighth floor, among the company's general offices. There, the menu is primarily grab-and go sandwiches, salads, soups and microwaveable entrees prepared in the main café below, plus breakfast pastries and bagels in the morning.

“We have found that the foodservice operations in Pioneer are a very good marketing point to introducing people to the Pioneer company,” Pinney says. “It lets prospective partners interact with our clients in a really positive way.”

Behind the Mezza servery is a central kitchen operation that not only prepares food for Mezza and Pronto but for Central Food Services, another Pioneer division that supplies meals to outside clients.

“Central fits our re-entry scheme very well because a lot of the offenders and ex-offenders had worked in the foodservice operation of the penal system,”Pinney says. “So this is a natural for folks like that.”

Central generates a profit, realizing sales of around $239,000 a month, producing some 3,000 meals a day for both Pioneer's internal clients (drug rehab centers, work releases, etc.) and external customers like King County Senior Services, which buys some 1,100 heat-and-serve lunches each day. The food is blast-chilled and distributed by Pioneer in four refrigerated vehicles to 28 different senior centers.

“We competed with for-profit companies to win this contract,” Pinney emphasizes. “We are expected to perform just like any other service provider in the private sector, and we do.”

The other Mezza Cafe in Bellvue is more of a street restaurant/coffee bar located in the city's Skylight Tower, an office building with some 1,500 employees. Pioneer would like to open more Mezza locations, but it is very careful not to overextend, Pinney says.

“Once we establish a service in an area, we try to put all the ‘legs of the stool’ there by providing the housing, the treatment and the employment opportunities,” explains Communications Director LorieAnn Larson. She notes that the company recently opened two buildings for housing in Spokane Count to support its treatment and work release programs there, “and we're now looking to bring in an enterprise so that there is an employment opportunity for those individuals and a way to support those programs.”

FAST FACTS

Name: Mezza Cafe

Location: Starbucks headquarters, Seattle

Daily Traffic: around 400

Avg. Monthly Revenue: $90,000

Stations: 6

Manager: Kevin Smith